For others here, did you learn Chinese (or Spanish, or Arabic, or Russian) to assist you in your travels? I've always found learning computer languages easy, but human languages frustratingly difficult for me (different muscles, I know).
Crossed the border, got a SIM card with a data plan. Browsed wikitravel, showed taxi driver the characters for where I wanted to go. Then just take another taxi ride to a hotel from google maps, reception spoke English. Rest of the trip went similarly. Had no problems.
He is brilliant, but having Chinese parents probably helped :)
You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do.
I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there.
I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different.
In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.
Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.
I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.
Although it was originally developed for Japanese, the basic concepts are not language-specific.
And while you're there you'll automatically learn some of the greetings and words in the local language. Try to apply what you've learned and they'll be delighted to see you try to speak the language.
If you ever get the chance to see the world, don't let something like a language barrier hold you back. Just go.
I did start Korean classes a few days into my trip (first time was study abroad) which set the stage for later. But I didn't know it going in, no.
I was practising my Hangul by reading the signs between Seoul and where I was staying out the bus window. The very first sign I read fully was "Noodle House", it was vaguely disappointing.
Saying Chinese is more of the language and Mandarin the dialect is somewhat akin to calling European the language (lest you think that ridiculous, note that this precise phenomenon occurs in Africa, where european languages are often referred to generically as white-ese[1]), and Greek the dialect.
Two weeks ago my Mac stopped booting. Made an appointment at the 14th Street Apple Store. Arrived 15 minutes early. Discovered there was a line to check in. That put you into a second line, the line to be seen by a "Genius". Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, I'm seen by someone with no intimate knowledge of my device. Laptop is checked in overnight.
Two days later, I receive my "fixed" Mac. SSD replaced, problem still there. Take it to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store at 4AM. This time I'm seen within 30 minutes of my appointment. "Genius" asks me to call phone support. Phone support insists Genius can solve the problem, asks to speak with Genius–nobody at store can find him. Thirty minutes later, phone support tells Genius what to do. Genius disappears into a back room, emerges 20 minutes later with the right tool. No clear answer as to what went wrong provided.
I am willing to pay for fast, smart solutions. Sometimes the brainpower is not available, and I accept that. Curious that I feel that brainpower would have been more amply available in the streets of Shenzhen than New York.
...although perhaps not at 4AM, which is when you went? Not to play down the fact you had a pretty rough time of it, but the fact you could find someone to fix is at 4AM is to me an achievement in and of itself.
This is in part because the EU and US is awake during Shenzhen's nighttime, and if people waited until the morning to fill all the orders coming their way, they'd have to spend all day catching up.
While my Mac was acting up, my iPhone also had issues. The first replacement I got had a logic board issue (continuous blue screen reboots). The evening Genius dismissed me after a restart. The 8AM Genius actually ran diagnostics.
Some level of replace-ability should be enforced by law. There should be universal interchangeable types of batteries. Board self-test should be available and so on.
On the engineering side, we should push for standards, and for components which operate the same at higher and lower volatges (2.0v, 2.2v, 3.0v, 3.5v, 5.0v, etc) where possible.
Also, you do not want a phone made by the government.
(The EU charger standard is a good example: it works very well at eliminating the stupid proliferation of chargers which end up in landfill or WEEE, but not everyone is happy with micro-USB and arguably it's now the weak point in many phones which causes them to break early)
Some Chinese men grow one fingernail quite long as a sign that they do not toil in the fields (else the nail would be broken)[1]. It has been for some time a symbol of high status. Yet here we see a long fingernail employed specifically to aid manual labor.
I now wonder if there are budget repair guys walking around Shenzhen appearing to show off their socioeconomic status but actually just hoping their nails don't break because it would make splitting open broken phones less convenient.
[1] http://www.vagabondjourney.com/why-chinese-men-grow-long-fin...
Bunnie has been there before:
Two impressions stuck with me...
First, I don't trust anything I buy anymore. If you buy a mobile phone on ebay, or if you buy one on amazon and it isn't fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, I don't think you can have any assurance that it is truly a brand new, factory produced device. I saw stall after stall after stall of women with long spools of holographic tape and "genuine nokia" stickers by the thousands who were brazenly re-wrapping and resealing both batteries and "new" devices. Bunnie speaks of the value of his spare parts, but the box and the manual would probably have been of equal value.
Second, I was surprised by the near total absence of anything truly interesting ... I spent 2.5 days looking for any tools or devices related to osmocom/openBTS/openBSC ... sim cloning, sim tracing, IMSI catching ... development kits or test hardware... and I saw not even a trace of this. I was also keeping my eyes open for any kind of console modding / console hacking and didn't see any of this either. I'm sure you could get your xbox chipped there, but beyond that ...
I'll be back soon ... I'd love to be proven wrong that there's nothing bleeding edge being hacked together around the phone-marts...
Sounds like he got scammed. Reballing only is a temporary few months at the most fix. Its not the pcb-bga contact that fails, its the silicon-bga package that has the problem. Reballing heats up whole chip and by accident reseals broken solder joints directly under the silicon. Those joints will crack again because NVIDIA used bad glue that gets plastic under heat stress.
The only way to fix bad Nvidia GPU is to replace it with a brand new one from the fixed batch with new glue formula.
It was astounding the first time I saw a dead MB revived with nothing more than a bathroom accessory!
Hair dryer in Bunnies case was used to heat up the GLUE between glass and screen.
This piece is interesting because it's a nice short story that gives a great sense of place. To me, it feels like Blade Runner. There's a society of people that can repair a $500 smartphone like it was reattaching rubber to a boot. They possess advanced repair skills, but belong to a class that would be doing menial labor here in America.
And most of us here can't reattach rubber to a boot either.
For example they can diagnose which part on a laptop motherboard is broken by observing current draw/time when booting and looking up answer in the notes (notes made by real engineer or guessed/bruteforced by another tinkerer). This way unqualified worker can tell you in under 30 second what needs to be replaced on a phone/tablet/laptop PCB. Its like a human powered repair database lookup machine, they are all working from the script. You could say they are all Indian DELL phone support line :)
Im not saying its bad, its just how it works.
If you're planning on doing this yourself, don't be tempted to buy an unbranded replacement - they may be fakes or poor quality reproductions (not gorilla glass, digitizer inaccurate, etc.) - My phone was a developer device but I replaced the screen with an AT&T branded one. The branded screens are usually genuine.
Also, if you have the tools (and I would recommend buying a small electronics tool set to everyone, because it's a lot cheaper and funner to fix stuff yourself than to pay someone to fix it), then you can buy a complete LCD + digitizer for $36 on Amazon. [2]
[1]http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/111483/iPhone+5+cracked+g...
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Generic-Screen-Digitizer-Assembly-Repl...
I ran into Ian and Jin from Dangerous Prototypes at the SF Bay MakerFaire last weekend where they were demonstrating the BGA reballing techniques we learned at the Land Mobile Repair School in Shenzhen. Ian told me that earlier in the Faire, a couple of Intel engineers stopped by to tell him that what he was doing was wrong, incorrect and impossible (or some combination thereof). He ran them through the process and left them agog, not only that the process developed by the Chinese (about $50USD in tools and supplies) was comparable to a $XX,000 reballing machine, but that they'd never seen or heard of these techniques before. They were throwing away prototypes worth thousands of dollars instead of fixing the problem because they didn't have proper reballing machines/jigs.
It is well worth the trip to Shenzhen if only to see them disassemble a phone completely and refurb it faster than imaginable. Ian hopes to make HCS a regular event and I highly recommend it!
a) You can typically find the person actually building the damn thing, and ask about it.
b) You can probably get your hands on a large set of cheap, defective parts to play around with.
c) You can get your hands on the actual parts really cheap.
b and c together vastly reduces the cost of experimentation, and more importantly, reduces the cost of screwing up.
This is some of what you lose when you become just the end node of the supply chain. This is the type of 'magic' that some people speak about when they talk about when 'America (or insert your choice of western democratic country) built things'.
This is useful advice not just for people doing it themselves, but to evaluate a shops ability to do rework. If its a busy shop catch a guy leaving with a replacement and ask to see some completed work.
There is an analogy with programming where a mere "it compiled" is not exactly the pinnacle of all possible compliments.
For example my Kindle 1st gen charging port was no longer snapping the connector cable correctly - I took it in and for 20Bs ($3) they fixed a soldered part that had come loose with the ins-and-outs of the charging cable.
> I had originally assumed that the glass on the digitizer is inseparable from the OLED, but apparently those clever folks in Hua Qiang Bei have figured out an efficient method...
There is a large amount of skill involved. I saw a designer take apart a smartphone to use the digitizer in a "looks like works like" prototype. Getting the glue off and otherwise dissembling a smartphone screen without breaking anything is not easy! It's not meant to be repairable. And this guy is a wizard at building prototypes.
I tried it and the phone did seem to go into some diagnostic mode and showed "please wait" for about 5 seconds, then just stopped with "Unknown Error" Sad.
I have tried to replace the set on an ipod touch in the past. Didn't succeed. Screwed up taking the face/body assembly apart.